Financials of a start-up farm

Most businesses don’t make money in their first year. The initial investments in property, supplies, utilities, and other product materials can be significant.

Farming is no different. I’ve spoken with some farmers who have spent almost a decade trying to turn a profit. It’s even more difficult for many of the sustainable farmers who don’t benefit from government subsidies in the same way the conventional farmers of the Midwest do. One farmer in Bedford County, Virginia, admitted to me that he would not be able to do what he does now if the land wasn’t already in his family’s name. Trying to lump that kind of property cost onto him (in addition to the machinery and other things he pays for) would have buried his farm.

I understand this now better than ever. I’ve said in other posts that farming is not my primary source of income, so financial impacts don’t hit me as hard as they would full-time agrarians. While we have sold some of our garlic and other produce in seasons past, 2011 is the first year that we have truly looked at this as a business, along with the marketing, inspections, certifications, etc. that go along with an energized business (it’s part of the reason you’re now reading this blog).

Despite our business-minded focus, our revenue stream remains small. We expect less than $1,000 this year in income from our produce. That is, if we didn’t have to occur any up-front costs. But this is essentially a start-up business, so costs abound. I’ve tallied our anticipated numbers, and once we account for holding back a part of our stock to use in the next planting, we will get back in sales only 50 to 60 percent of the money we have put into farming this year.

That means hundreds of dollars that we will lose. The notion isn’t entirely unexpected. Farming is something that my wife and I love, and like any passion (whether it’s skiing, boating, bowling, hiking, automobiles, etc.), people have to spend money to pursue it. We do hope that as our investment costs go down, that gap between what we spend and what we make in revenue will close ever more tightly. Someday, our spreadsheets may even go into the black.

But as part-time farmers, making money isn’t our priority. Getting good food -- grown in the best ways -- to people is important. It goes back to the idea of being stewards of our land, of the environment, and of society. That mentality does pay for itself.

Accepting farming in many forms

Everyone has an agenda, but not everyone makes their agenda apparent. And a good journalist does what he or she can to set aside any bias and write factually and objectively on topics for which the writer may not agree.

In many parts of my life -- especially my work professionally in print and online journalism -- I seek out that balance both in my own work and in the work of others. Last night, a colleague and I had a brief, but important, discussion about our feelings toward different farming methods.

My bias, as it may come out in this blog, is in favor of sustainable farming, which often incorporates organic and organic-like processes (such as the grass-roots Certified Naturally Grown). However, I did grow up in Indiana, where corn and soybeans are abundant -- as are the pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizers to encourage their growth and easy harvest. If I could call the world a perfect place, we wouldn’t have any of those chemicals being sprayed onto our food.

Of course, the world is not a perfect place, and I have come to accept these things that I perceive to be imperfections. Conventional farming is solidly ingrained in society and supported by our government through federal subsidies. Authors and advocates such as Michael Pollan have highlighted the links between chronic health problems in America and the rise of processed and chemically altered food. They have also shown us that conventional farming produces crops that are less nutritious for the current generation than they were for our parents’ and grandparents’ generations.

The key, though, is that conventional farming produces. Period. It’s not what it produces, it’s simply that it does produce. Without this method of farming, people would starve. Usable farmland is being devoured by development as the population of the world grows and grows. That forces the agriculture industry to seek higher yields and to make those yields more affordable to consumers. Pollan gained my respect when, after chapters of promoting his vision of the ideal agricultural society in his book “In Defense of Food,” he did make concessions that the ideal won’t work for everyone.

Sustainable farming can’t survive against the rising price of land, and people without a farming ancestry rarely can afford -- or would choose -- to become first-generation farmers.

Accepting things for what they are doesn’t mean standing idle while the environment and health of society deteriorate. Speaking for change is good. Telling the government to spend more encouraging sustainable agriculture projects and less on conventional ones is good. Walking to the farmers market and buying the fresh produce there is good.

And realizing that conventional farming has its role in our modern, populated world is okay, too. We don’t have to love it, but failing to acknowledge it is simply irresponsible.

Selling stewardship from the start

I am currently reading “Just Food” by James McWilliams, who argues about flaws in the locavore movement. The environmental underbelly of the process, he says, is that agricultural pollution isn’t primarily caused by the final transportation of the product but rather is compounded during the planting, harvesting, and processing of the crops. His early points suggest that larger, commercial farms are much more efficient than local (often, smaller) farms during many of the production stages and that their impact on the environment is considerably less than your farmer down the road.

There is a lot to be said for this approach to understanding the locavore movement, and I do take to heart some of the things that McWilliams is presenting. However, there are many questions to be asked, and I am still too early in the book to see whether I will receive answers to them. Here and now, the biggest question, as a small farmer myself, is: Why indict “the locavore movement” when some of us might be doing things right?

At Cherry Lane Farm, we have begun to harvest this year’s garlic. Over the past couple of years, we have planted more and more of our crop, meaning that the effort on both ends of the production process has become more time consuming and more difficult. What hasn’t changed with that expansion, though, is the structure of how we do things.

While I understand and accept that there is little chance sustainable farming will become the norm -- especially as global population growth fuels the need for commercial agriculture -- my wife and I at Cherry Lane Farm promote agriculture that has little-to-no impact on the environment and is healthful for the consumer. We are stewards of the land and of society. Machinery is kept to a minimum; muscle is maximized.

This week, as I began to dig up our garlic bulbs one-by-one with a shovel, I also thought back to when they were planted in October and November of last year. I took a spade and other hand tools and painstakingly dug the trenches. The only machinery used over the past eight months was a shallow hand tiller, which created trace amounts of erosion. Even looking a couple of weeks back, the garlic scapes were cut from the hardneck varieties with hand clippers -- patience being the most important part of the harvest.

Pulling the garlic from the ground, brushing the dirt away, and carefully setting it to dry is an intimate process. You become more in tune with what you’ve created and you don’t relinquish that connection to the cold metal of a machine.

Since I’m employed full-time elsewhere, my livelihood doesn’t depend on what I grow. The riches are spiritual instead of financial. And the method in which I harvest becomes impossible once a certain scale of production is reached. But as a grower and seller locally, I feed the locavore ideology. Environmentally, there are drawbacks to elements of the movement. But economically (and often nutritionally), the perks abound.

And when garlic or other produce is harvested with the simplicity of sweat and a spade, environmental stewardship becomes sound as well.